Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Is It True?

Is it True? Uncovering the Heart of Each of the World's Religions

The University of Toronto Secular alliance (UTSA), in conjunction with Power 2 Change, Muslim Students Association and the Multifaith Centre is hosting a lecture and discussion series entitled "…is it true?"

Each speaker will speak on behalf of the philosophical framework to which they subscribe to. Following the lecture, there will be a period of Q and A following by an open discussion amongst attendees.

I encourage you to attend these talks as I suspect a lot of fruitful conversations can emerge. To this end, specifically, we are delighted to have biochemist Dr. Larry Moran, represent our side of the conversation.

Well either all are wrong or all but one is wrong or some are wrong but it can't be everybody is right.Is the "Christian" Evangelical or protestant or what?Surely christianity has earned its spurs in western civilization and the others are off-broadway faiths.Just noting the fact.

Apparently, even people who reveal their identity in some comments, sign as ‘Anonymous’ in others, either because they do not want to take responsibility for all their comments or because they want to promote a particular course for discussion. There are also rumors that some blog-hosts have numerous ‘false-identities’ which they use to increase the apparent popularity of their blogs.

I wonder is this just another... Pick a non-scietific religious person and blast them with a fairy tale brand of science, that has never been proven, and can not be tested either, I might add and the parts that have been tested has been found wanting! And when they cannot respond to it, it makes this fairy tale brand look so very real and reasonable.

Richard Dawkins loves this tactic and so has many other supposed free thinkers. Shame on them!

Equating religion with Abrahamism is a common tactic among adherents of Abrahamic faiths, though quite weird considering a goodly fraction of their religions' scriptures consist of denunciations of non-Abrahamic religions.

> Malky: I never understand why the religious are so certain in their beliefs whatever they are.

Here's how it works in my case, I'm not perfectly certain, I'm making my best estimate. Let's hope we all are.

Then as you become convinced of something, you can express yourself more decidedly.

Which brings us to a pertinent point, how can an atheist demonstrate a universal negative? I shall no doubt be told we do not believe in elves and other antiquaries, and for good reason. The question then becomes, whether there is positive evidence for God.

Then the atheist will be put in the position of debunking evidence, instead of presenting anything of a positive case himself.

This brings to mind a complaint raised by those who object to intelligent design arguments...

Which alleged god are you convinced of or making your best estimate of, and would you be convinced of or making your best estimate of the same god (and associated beliefs) if you had been born into a hindu, or candomblé, or jain, or pagan, or atheist family and society?

Can you show any positive evidence of your alleged god? And if you claim to have positive evidence can you also show that it's only evidence of your alleged god and that all the other alleged gods people have ever thought up cannot and never did exist?

What if you've chosen the wrong religion? Are you a christian because of the "dire warnings" and your fear of the consequences of those warnings?

Other religions have dire warnings too. If one of those religions with dire warnings is 'right' and christianity is wrong and you're a christian instead of a follower of the 'right' religion, aren't you afraid that you will suffer the consequences of the dire warnings of the 'right' religion?

robert, I'm curious, if the marsupials in Australia are marsupials because of minor adaptations to the area they live in then why haven't the placental mammals that have been introduced into the same areas in Australia adapted in the same way and become marsupials?

And can you explain the Virginia Opossum? It's a marsupial that is native to North America.

This is not the place to talk about this.marsupials were common in South America also.The adaptation was probably just to increase reproduction numbers. It's always about reproduction. these were the farthest areas from the ark and there was a timeline I believe.Just minor adaption. This minor thing forced weird conclusions about convergent evolution making carbon copies of everything exceopt adding a pouch.

I see. Hoppimng. A kangaroo being suffocated (with a plastic binliner) atteempting to escape?Douglas Adams wrote about his suapicion that the mice were really controlling the Earth, and carrying out a covert experiment with the planet using humans to solve the Greatest mystery of all.Have you read Hitchhikers Guide?There is as much evidence for that theory as there is for your Marsupial one (in fact I think Adams' idea is more plausible than yours). Do you know anything, even the tiniest scrap, about anatomy or about cells? Anything about Mitochondria, for example? Structure of the skull (or of jaws; or about the bones of the inner ear; actually do you know anything at all about Biology? How about dentition?). I can already guess how your answer will hurtle back to me, but I just thought I would ask anyway. No harm in giving the link again:http://nwcreation.net/articles/marsupial_migration.html

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.